MRTG is an awesome program/service that runs under Windows and *nix platforms. It's widely used in custom Linux distributions such as smoothwall, IPCop and others, to display resouce usage such as memory, CPU, hard disk space e.t.c

The real power of MRTG is unleashed when using it to monitor WAN/LAN links and bandwidth utilisation, providing an awesome graph showing a network administrator the information he needs in a quick, simple and smart way.

MRTG is configurable to work with virutaly any device/node as long at it supports SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) by which it obtains all the information mentioned above.

Perhaps the most difficult part of its installation is trying to get the correct MIB's for your network device - a task that requires some decent amount of time, but the result is simply stunning.

My goal is to get MRTG and Nagios (Nagios.org) - a network monitoring system - working together, giving an Administrator an overall view of his network, no matter how many WAN/LAN links it might have.

If I ever get the time to complete the project, expect a full analysis and step by step configuration from us!!!

Yeah, general agreement all round. Configuring the thing is sort of made easier by the 'config maker' provided. Basically you let that loose on your router and it enumerates all the interfaces and generates an MRTG config file to graph them. In my application I then had to go through the config file and manually remove all the stuff I didn't need (a graph for each B-channel of a primary rate ISDN is comprehensive but somewhat over the top). Even so, I still think it's a great tool

MRTG can plot ANYTHING !!!!!! using RRD tool that caome with it. I manage a handful of my customers with it now. All the data is live, customer can view it at anytime. The cool thing that has been introduced is Threshold monitoring.

I spend most of the day in the pub with my pager, MRTG takes care of everything, and pages me when something is about to happen !

The great thing about MRTG is that WE develop it and the vendors are starting to take note of this. They even tell you how to integrate MRTG with their systems !

The Multi Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG) is a tool to monitor the traffic load on network-links. MRTG generates HTML pages containing GIF images which provide a LIVE visual representation of this traffic